مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

There is increasing attention on the morality of corporate tax strategies (CTSs) that try to minimize as much as possible corporation’s tax liabilities (Dowling, 2014; Scheffer, 2013; Sikka, 2010). Global corporations are accused of exploiting national rules in order to pay low taxes on profits made in jurisdictions where they record high sales (Ting, 2014).

Past research has focused mostly on the macro level (e.g., Scheffer, 2013) examining whether aggressive minimization strategies generate negative reactions from stakeholders that affect corporate performance. Some authors find an overall negative impact of aggressive CTSs on firm value (e.g., Hanlon & Slemrod, 2009) while others find no significant overall impact (e.g., Gallemore, Maydew, & Thornock, 2014). Few studies, however, examine how CTSs can affect psychologically organizational stakeholders (Huang & Watson, 2015). Hardeck and Hertl (2014) provide a first examination of how CTSs impact consumer behavior, showing that individuals are willing to punish companies adopting aggressive CTSs and likely to reward companies that do not plan proactively to minimize their tax burden.

Some scholars argue that tax planning decisions should be considered as part of an organization’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) profile (Dowling, 2014; Sikka, 2010; Scheffer, 2013). Companies with a poor CSR record are in fact more likely to employ aggressive CTSs (Hoi, Wu, & Zhang, 2013; Lanis & Richardson, 2015). To the best of our knowledge, however, no study has examined to what extent stakeholders’ reactions to CTSs are motivated by their inferences of corporate ethicality. Although scholars assume that tax planning leads to ethical judgments (Hardeck & Hertl, 2014), we test this assumption explicitly. Since organizations are increasingly keen to present their CTSs as responsible in the hope that it might engender positive effects (Bhattacharya, Korschun, & Sen, 2009; Hardeck & Hertl, 2014) it is important to probe that such expectation holds empirically.